Is The Economy as Bad as Trump Says?
Last night, my wife and I went out with a friend for a New Year’s dinner at a local, family-style restaurant outside of Springfield, MA. The tab came to $30 apiece. The night before, we took my wife’s son and his family out to dinner at a bistro-kind of place on Boston’s North Shore. The bill was $60 apiece. Earlier in the week we took my wife’s daughter and her family out to dinner at a fancy-schmancy joint in Westport, CT and the meal cost $90 apiece.
All three restaurants were jammed. I mean there wasn’t an empty table and as soon as a group finished eating and left, another group came in and sat down at the same place.
Now granted, this isn’t any kind of scientific analysis, but if all three restaurants -cheap, medium, expensive – didn’t have an empty table on two different nights this past week, could you please tell me how come I keep hearing stories about how everyone thinks the economy is for shit or worse?
Of course, how the ‘average’ American views the economy has become yet another hyper-partisan question in which the answer largely depends on how someone intends to vote. So, back in April, when Pew did a detailed survey of how Americans viewed the economy, 61% of Republicans said that the 2024 economy would be worse, whereas only 31% of Democrats agreed with that negative view of how bad things would get.
Meanwhile, the partisan divide over the economy begins to disappear when respondents were asked how they felt about the cost of food and consumer items, with 78% of the Republicans saying this was a problem, but 66% of the Democrats saying the same thing as well.
Trying to take advantage of the degree to which both blue and red voters are voicing unease about prices for consumer and stale goods, the GOP has rolled out a conservative economist, Arthur Laffer, to explain how the red team can take advantage of this shared concern about the economy when Americans go to the polls. If you are more than 60 years old and not joining crooked Joe in his dwindling mental state, you might recall that Laffer was the economist who helped Reagan sell the big tax cut in 1981, which made him the darling of the GOP from then until now.
In a political advertisement on FOX, disguised as an interview, Laffer said that telling Americans that inflation is down doesn’t give them any comfort because “people worry about prices, not inflation … even though the inflation rate is down quite substantially, the prices are not down at all, and it's prices that are killing people, so they obviously are upset."
Maybe what the Democrats need to do is instead of announcing the monthly price change of what is referred to as the market basket, they should list a bunch of products like milk, eggs, bread, butter, hamburger meat and bananas, and give the actual checkout price for each item.
So, instead of saying that meat went up 1.02% last month from the month before, the Commerce Department could say that a pound of chopped beef that cost $4.43 at Walmart in November cost $4.39 in October, and a dozen eggs which cost $5.05 in a New Jersey Stop & Shop in October cost $5.10 in November.
Is that stupid enough for everyone to understand that what Donald Trump has been barking all year about the ‘ruinous inflation’ is nothing but his own brand of hot air?
Maybe yes, maybe no. But with all due respect to Arthur Laffer, who was given a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump in 2019 and has served as an on-again, off-again economic adviser to Trump over the last few years, I believe that how Americans view the economy and every other political issue these days has little, if anything to do with how the Biden Administration explains things.
I really wish I had the know-how and the time to write a book that would do for social media what Marshall McLuhan did for mass media when he published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, back in 1975. Because if the ‘medium was the message’ for McLuhan, for me ‘disinformation is the message’ for social media.
And if there’s one area in social media where disinformation reigns supreme, it’s the way in which Donald Trump still commands attention whenever he says anything about how the 2020 election was stolen or how the country’s economy has run aground.
Someone out there has to be working on a new communication technology which will eventually put social media into the handbasket which now contains smoke signals and the Morse Code. Whomever you are, please get it done.